Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Work, Money, Living and Livelihood

﻿Prevalent attitudes toward work and money are curious. People tend to value work in terms of money: an occupation has value if and only if it makes money, and the measure of its value is how much money it makes. If what you do makes money, then it has value regardless of what it is you do. And if what you do does not make money, then it lacks value regardless of what it is.

A man stands on a street corner, Bible in hand, and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ. Passersby regard him as of no account, as a loser, a bum, a fanatic. They give him a wide berth and would be embarrassed to be seen associating with him. But let the fellow clean himself up, get himself admitted to a divinity school, earn a degree and become an assistant pastor somewhere, and suddenly he has social status of sorts. For now his preaching is a livelihood, a means of attaining a comfortable living standard, and he is now a serious and productive member of society. He is now of account and is known to be such at the local bank. He amounts to something in the economic and social currency of the realm. As the Danish Socrates might have said, he has learned how to make a living from the fact that another man was crucified. The allusion, of course, is to Kierkegaard.

A novelist sits in her garret and scribbles away day by day. Her relatives and acquaintances think her a failure despite two published novels. You see, they fell stillborn from the press and she barely covered the costs of writing them. When she explains that she lives for her art, some smile indulgently, others display demeanors that run from quizzical to scornful, but all mock her behind her back. For it is clear to them that she is wasting her time on a lot of nonsense. But let the novelist hit paydirt, and all changes. Now she is of account. Scorn turns to envy. She is on her way to becoming a person of substance in one of the more crass senses of this irridescent word. For now she has found a way to turn a buck from her writing, and that confers value upon it.

Suppose there were no way to make a living from philosophy, or that one’s chances of making a living from it were about as good as a chess player’s from chess. Suppose, in other words, that philosophy had no place in university curricula and that there were no teaching jobs. How much philosophy would be published? How many journals and presses would go under? How many introductory texts would see the light of day? What would become of the professional organizations, the conferences and congresses and the rest of all that philosophically marginal busy-ness? How many ‘philosophers’ would abandon philosophy and end up in real estate?

Would it be a bad thing if there were no way to live from philosophy? The answer is not obvious and indeed depends on one’s conception of philosophy. Consider a related question: Would it be a bad thing if no one were able to make a living from religion? In thinking about these questions, you may want to consider the examples of Paul the tentmaker, Spinoza the lensgrinder, and Thoreau the surveyor.

What they lived for, and what they lived from, were kept distinct. An exemplary modus vivendi if you want my opinion.